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Just posted on Gary North's site. It may be time to seriously consider your
family's contingency plans, and then maybe quicken your pace towards full
readiness.
If you were a top government, business or religious leader, would you spell out
to your constitchuants, employees and followers the truth of what you really
knew, knowing that because of your influence, you could be the one who started
the cascade of chaos, or would you also find it expedient to lie, to give
everyone more time to get ready?
Just what day between today and December 31 1999, do you believe the population
of the U.S. will reach critical mass in their thinking that they should get
their money out of the banks and/or the stock market as part of their
contingency plans? And what percent of the population doing such, will pull the
flush handle and dump the economy into freefall into the great toilet bowl of
the world?
Now read this from Gary North: http://www.garynorth.com/y2k/detail_.cfm/2834
Gary North's Y2K Links and Forums
Summary and Comments
(feel free to mail this page)
Category:
Power_Grid
Date:
1998-10-10 17:55:23
Subject:
The NERC Report: Timetable of a Guaranteed Disaster
Link:
ftp://ftp.nerc.com/pub/sys/all_updl/docs/y2k/y2kreport-doe.pdf
Comment:
I have waited for three weeks for those inside and
outside the power
industry to have their say on the September 17 report
of the North
American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) to the
Department of
Energy (DOE -- soon to be DOA). My assessment is less
complimentary than those that have preceded mine.
Before we get started, you should recognize that
something bordering
on a y2k blackout is in operation at the Department
of Energy. We
might call it the blackout blackout. Go to the
Department of Energy's
Website. See if there is anything on y2k on the home
page. Check
out its content map. See if you spot anything on y2k.
The DOE is
saying as little as possible on y2k. It has washed
its hands of y2k. It
says, "Call NERC."
The background:
On May 1, 1998 ("Mayday! Mayday!") -- incredibly late
-- the
Department of Energy sent a letter to NERC asking
NERC to take
over the responsibility of monitoring and
co-ordinating the y2k repair
for the U.S. electric industry. NERC is a tiny
organization that is
funded by the electric power industry. NERC accepted.
This was a
major transfer of responsibility from the U.S.
government to an
underfunded private organization without legal
authority to compel
anyone to do anything. I know of no more flagrant
example of
governmental buck-passing since the creation of the
Federal Reserve
System in 1913. As soon as the deal was done, the
Secretary of
Energy resigned from office. I do not blame him.
NERC knows that y2k may create a cascading power
failure that
could pull the entire industry into a maelstrom of
blackouts. This,
NERC calls the "weakest link" problem. The industry
will survive or
fail as a unit, NERC says. The question is: Will the
companies all be
ready, and will their operations coordinate with each
other in 2000?
NERC has now produced a report, based on voluntary
compliance,
summarizing what various companies told NERC, but
which NERC
did not verify. It delivered this report to the DOE.
The DOE has
deep-sixed it.
I used DOE's search engine. I searched for NERC. This
report did
not come up. I searched for North American Electric
Reliability
Council. I searched for y2k and year 2000. This
report did not come
up.
Go to NERC's Web site. See if you can find anything
about this
report. It's there, but you have to search for it.
It's on the Year 2000
page, which is not easy to find.
The first page of the report has an optimistic tone.
This tone is
independent of the facts presented in the report.
Electrical power is the most important industry in
the U.S. If it goes
down and stays down for 60 days, worldwide, Western
civilization
will collapse. The West is a civilization of city
dwellers, and without
electricity, cities would lose water, food, heating,
and
communications within hours or days. All it would
take is 60 days
without electricity to pull the plug on this
civilization -- and this may
be too optimistic. A month might do it. Think of New
York City for a
month without food deliveries or heat in January.
The report says this: "Will the lights go out? The
answer is that no
one knows for certain what the effects of Y2K will
be" (p. 7). On
this, the most important question that has to be
answered in the next
14 months, the authors just can't say. They have
opinions, but they
can't say.
I am not much interested in their official opinions,
whoever these
people are. I am interested in the facts they have
presented, assuming
they are facts, which no independent third party
agency has verified.
Fact #1. 25% if the companies that were asked to
provide
information refused to send any (p. 18). The report
offers no
conclusion as to why, although it does mention that
one reason might
be that they are so far behind.
Fact #2. 64% of those actually bothering to reply had
a y2k plan.
33% say they are working on a plan. 3% said they have
none and
have no intention of writing one (p. 20).
Fact #3. NERC's report does not deal with y2k
compliance, which is
too strict a standard. It is concerned with y2k
readiness. "Y2K ready
means a system has been determined 'suitable for
continued use into
the year 2000.' Note that this is not necessarily the
same as Y2K
compliant, which implies fully correct date
manipulations" (p. 20). I
ask: Determined suitable by whom? Obviously, by each
reporting
company's officers.
Fact #4. In NERC's classification system of
inventory, assessment,
and remediation/testing, "most responding entities
are early in the
completion of the Remediation/Testing phase" (p. 23).
Fact #5. The industry as of August was finished with
65% of the
assessment phase. October 31 is the recommended
deadline by
NERC (p. 24).
Fact #6. Industry-wide, 28% of the
remediation/testing task is
completed. The expected deadline is June 30, 1999 (p.
24).
In a typical software remediation project -- no
embedded chips --
inventory and assessment combined are a y2k project's
initial 7%.
NERC's deadline for the first 7% is October 31. Of
that percentage
of the industry that reported back to NERC, only
two-thirds of the
assessment phase was completed as of August. NERC's
deadline for
completion of mission-critical systems is June 30,
1999 (p. 25). It
took the industry from 1995 or (more likely for most
of them) 1996
until August, 1998, to get through two-thirds of the
initial 7% of the
repair. I shall put it delicately. NERC's timetable
is optimistic. If I
were General George Patton, I would put it
differently.
Fact #7. Nuclear power plants that reported back are
much further
behind on assessment. They reported that they expect
to be 40%
completed sometime in November. They expect to have
100% of the
assessment phase completed by March 31, 1999 (p. 33).
NERC adds that because many of these plants are
older, they use
analogue systems rather than digital, so their
systems may be easier
to repair (p. 34). This has yet to be proven; there
is no compliant or
even "ready" nuclear plant. Also, it is important to
understand that
NERC is reporting only on the power production side
of their
operations. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission
regulates the safety
and reporting side. Even if a few of them reach
compliance on power
production, the NRC is required by law to shut them
down if they
aren't compliant on reporting. (For the NRC, "ready"
won't cut it; the
plants must be compliant.)
Fact #8. Telecommunications is vital to power
generation, as NERC
reports. Of those systems under the control of the
power plants,
87% of the inventory is finished, 68% of the
assessment, and 36% of
remediation/testing.
This does not count the telecommunications industry
itself. NERC
has no authority over telecommunications. (NERC has
no authority
over anyone.)
Fact #8. Software vendors are another matter. "A
single vendor
could make large numbers of utilities vulnerable to
Y2K problems"
(p. 45).
When NERC speaks of testing/remediation, it is
talking about a
company's internal code, not its vendor-supplied
code. If the vendors
do not deliver compliant ("ready") software, then all
the repairs on
internal systems will be for naught. NERC did not
contact or report
on vendors. Also, the testing process must include
vendor-supplied
software, so the later it is supplied and installed,
the less likely final
testing will be complete.
Now we get to some funny business. Here you must pay
very close
attention to dancing definitions. The word "chip" is
used
interchangeably with "device." Sometimes a device is
a board full of
chips. Sometimes it is one chip. In the context of
the passage, this is
very suspicious. I would call it misleading.
The issue is embedded chips/systems.
"A single circuit board can have 20-50 of these chips
from various
manufacturers. Because of the diversity of chip
suppliers, one vendor
may use a different mix of chips even within devices
labeled with the
same name, model number, and year. Many of these
chips have built
in clocks that may experience date change anomalies
associated with
Y2K. The difficulty is in identifying all of these
devices, determining if
they have a Y2K problem, and repairing or replacing
those that do."
So far, so good. This sounds correct. It also sounds
daunting. A
circuit board or device may be defective because of
just one chip.
Replacing the entire board may lead to another
problem with another
chip, since manufacturers buy the same type of chip
from several
manufacturers. So, the new replacement board may fail
in 2000, too,
for the same or different reasons. What about a chip
that is no longer
in production? What about a device/board that is no
longer in
production? These issues should be dealt with
publicly by NERC.
They aren't.
Now things get a lttle difficult to follow:
It is estimated that less than 1-2% of these devices
may use a
time/date function in a manner that could result in a
Y2K malfunction
of the device" (p. 9).
First, who estimates 1-2%? Second, is this an
industry-wide
estimation? The figure 3% is becoming more common for
chips in
general, which the passage indicates they are.
Second, "a malfunction of the device" can refer to
the chip or the
board containing 20 to 50 chips. NERC uses "device"
both ways.
This is not good. If there are two boards, each
containing 50 chips,
and the failure rate for chips is 1%, one of those
boards is likely to
fail. If the failure rate is 3%, the odds of failure
of one of them
increases.
What this means is that the failure rate for embedded
systems
(boards/circuits/devices) is high, even though the
likely failure rate for
one chip is low. This distinction is confirmed in
other industries. The
failure rate in complex systems is 50% to 80%; in
manufacturing,
15%; in simple systems, 5%. In ships, it is 20%.
Conclusions. NERC has no authority. It is simply the
useful whipping
boy for the Department of Energy. If the power system
goes down,
nobody at NERC will be whipped. There will be no U.S.
government. If power delivery merely gets erratic,
but stays up
nationally, who can hold NERC responsible? It was
just doing its job
-- a job without subpoena power. It just reported
what companies
told NERC. If some company lies to NERC or misleads
NERC, so
what? NERC has no civil power. It's just an
industry-funded
research group. The company's executives are not
under oath.
In short, the DOE/NERC deal makes lying cheap. In an
industry in
which truth-telling would create a national panic,
lying is politically
necessary -- a basic function of State. Lowering the
cost of lying is
what the DOE/NERC deal is all about. That's my
theory, anyway.
What's yours?
Here we sit, waiting for a disaster. Our neighbors
know nothing of
NERC. They know nothing of the threat. The press
reported a few
lines and went on to other matters. Is anything in
today's news more
important than the status of electrical power
generation? The silence
of the lambs is matched only by the silence of their
shepherds. This
situation is nothing short of bizarre. If you
survive, it will be something
to tell to your grandchildren, if they survive.
Link:
ftp://ftp.nerc.com/pub/sys/all_updl/docs/y2k/y2kreport-doe.pdf
--------------F07250ED437AACDAD04E2620
Content-Type: text/html; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Just posted on Gary North's site. It may be time to seriously consider
your family's contingency plans, and then maybe quicken your pace towards
full readiness.
If you were a top government, business or religious leader, would you
spell out to your constitchuants, employees and followers the truth of
what you really knew, knowing that because of your influence, you could
be the one who started the cascade of chaos, or would you also find it
expedient to lie, to give everyone more time to get ready?
Just what day between today and December 31 1999, do you believe the
population of the U.S. will reach critical mass in their thinking that
they should get their money out of the banks and/or the stock market as
part of their contingency plans? And what percent of the population
doing such, will pull the flush handle and dump the economy into freefall
into the great toilet bowl of the world?
Now read this from Gary North:
http://www.garynorth.com/y2k/detail_.cfm/2834
Gary North's Y2K Links and Forums
Summary and Comments
(feel free to mail this page)
Category:
Power_Grid
Date:
1998-10-10 17:55:23
Subject:
The NERC Report: Timetable of a Guaranteed Disaster
Link:
ftp://ftp.nerc.com/pub/sys/all_updl/docs/y2k/y2kreport-doe.pdf
Comment:
I have waited for three weeks for those inside and outside the power
industry to have their say on the September 17 report of the North
American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) to the Department of
Energy (DOE -- soon to be DOA). My assessment is less
complimentary than those that have preceded mine.
Before we get started, you should recognize that something bordering
on a y2k blackout is in operation at the Department of Energy. We
might call it the blackout blackout. Go to the Department of Energy's
Website. See if there is anything on y2k on the home page. Check
out its content map. See if you spot anything on y2k. The DOE is
saying as little as possible on y2k. It has washed its hands of y2k. It
says, "Call NERC."
The background:
On May 1, 1998 ("Mayday! Mayday!") -- incredibly late -- the
Department of Energy sent a letter to NERC asking NERC to take
over the responsibility of monitoring and co-ordinating the y2k repair
for the U.S. electric industry. NERC is a tiny organization that is
funded by the electric power industry. NERC accepted. This was a
major transfer of responsibility from the U.S. government to an
underfunded private organization without legal authority to compel
anyone to do anything. I know of no more flagrant example of
governmental buck-passing since the creation of the Federal Reserve
System in 1913. As soon as the deal was done, the Secretary of
Energy resigned from office. I do not blame him.
NERC knows that y2k may create a cascading power failure that
could pull the entire industry into a maelstrom of blackouts. This,
NERC calls the "weakest link" problem. The industry will survive or
fail as a unit, NERC says. The question is: Will the companies all be
ready, and will their operations coordinate with each other in 2000?
NERC has now produced a report, based on voluntary compliance,
summarizing what various companies told NERC, but which NERC
did not verify. It delivered this report to the DOE. The DOE has
deep-sixed it.
I used DOE's search engine. I searched for NERC. This report did
not come up. I searched for North American Electric Reliability
Council. I searched for y2k and year 2000. This report did not come
up.
Go to NERC's Web site. See if you can find anything about this
report. It's there, but you have to search for it. It's on the Year 2000
page, which is not easy to find.
The first page of the report has an optimistic tone. This tone is
independent of the facts presented in the report.
Electrical power is the most important industry in the U.S. If it goes
down and stays down for 60 days, worldwide, Western civilization
will collapse. The West is a civilization of city dwellers, and without
electricity, cities would lose water, food, heating, and
communications within hours or days. All it would take is 60 days
without electricity to pull the plug on this civilization -- and this may
be too optimistic. A month might do it. Think of New York City for a
month without food deliveries or heat in January.
The report says this: "Will the lights go out? The answer is that no
one knows for certain what the effects of Y2K will be" (p. 7). On
this, the most important question that has to be answered in the next
14 months, the authors just can't say. They have opinions, but they
can't say.
I am not much interested in their official opinions, whoever these
people are. I am interested in the facts they have presented, assuming
they are facts, which no independent third party agency has verified.
Fact #1. 25% if the companies that were asked to provide
information refused to send any (p. 18). The report offers no
conclusion as to why, although it does mention that one reason might
be that they are so far behind.
Fact #2. 64% of those actually bothering to reply had a y2k plan.
33% say they are working on a plan. 3% said they have none and
have no intention of writing one (p. 20).
Fact #3. NERC's report does not deal with y2k compliance, which is
too strict a standard. It is concerned with y2k readiness. "Y2K ready
means a system has been determined 'suitable for continued use into
the year 2000.' Note that this is not necessarily the same as Y2K
compliant, which implies fully correct date manipulations" (p. 20). I
ask: Determined suitable by whom? Obviously, by each reporting
company's officers.
Fact #4. In NERC's classification system of inventory, assessment,
and remediation/testing, "most responding entities are early in the
completion of the Remediation/Testing phase" (p. 23).
Fact #5. The industry as of August was finished with 65% of the
assessment phase. October 31 is the recommended deadline by
NERC (p. 24).
Fact #6. Industry-wide, 28% of the remediation/testing task is
completed. The expected deadline is June 30, 1999 (p. 24).
In a typical software remediation project -- no embedded chips --
inventory and assessment combined are a y2k project's initial 7%.
NERC's deadline for the first 7% is October 31. Of that percentage
of the industry that reported back to NERC, only two-thirds of the
assessment phase was completed as of August. NERC's deadline for
completion of mission-critical systems is June 30, 1999 (p. 25). It
took the industry from 1995 or (more likely for most of them) 1996
until August, 1998, to get through two-thirds of the initial 7% of the
repair. I shall put it delicately. NERC's timetable is optimistic. If I
were General George Patton, I would put it differently.
Fact #7. Nuclear power plants that reported back are much further
behind on assessment. They reported that they expect to be 40%
completed sometime in November. They expect to have 100% of the
assessment phase completed by March 31, 1999 (p. 33).
NERC adds that because many of these plants are older, they use
analogue systems rather than digital, so their systems may be easier
to repair (p. 34). This has yet to be proven; there is no compliant or
even "ready" nuclear plant. Also, it is important to understand that
NERC is reporting only on the power production side of their
operations. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulates the safety
and reporting side. Even if a few of them reach compliance on power
production, the NRC is required by law to shut them down if they
aren't compliant on reporting. (For the NRC, "ready" won't cut it; the
plants must be compliant.)
Fact #8. Telecommunications is vital to power generation, as NERC
reports. Of those systems under the control of the power plants,
87% of the inventory is finished, 68% of the assessment, and 36% of
remediation/testing.
This does not count the telecommunications industry itself. NERC
has no authority over telecommunications. (NERC has no authority
over anyone.)
Fact #8. Software vendors are another matter. "A single vendor
could make large numbers of utilities vulnerable to Y2K problems"
(p. 45).
When NERC speaks of testing/remediation, it is talking about a
company's internal code, not its vendor-supplied code. If the vendors
do not deliver compliant ("ready") software, then all the repairs on
internal systems will be for naught. NERC did not contact or report
on vendors. Also, the testing process must include vendor-supplied
software, so the later it is supplied and installed, the less likely final
testing will be complete.
Now we get to some funny business. Here you must pay very close
attention to dancing definitions. The word "chip" is used
interchangeably with "device." Sometimes a device is a board full of
chips. Sometimes it is one chip. In the context of the passage, this is
very suspicious. I would call it misleading.
The issue is embedded chips/systems.
"A single circuit board can have 20-50 of these chips from various
manufacturers. Because of the diversity of chip suppliers, one vendor
may use a different mix of chips even within devices labeled with the
same name, model number, and year. Many of these chips have built
in clocks that may experience date change anomalies associated with
Y2K. The difficulty is in identifying all of these devices, determining
if
they have a Y2K problem, and repairing or replacing those that do."
So far, so good. This sounds correct. It also sounds daunting. A
circuit board or device may be defective because of just one chip.
Replacing the entire board may lead to another problem with another
chip, since manufacturers buy the same type of chip from several
manufacturers. So, the new replacement board may fail in 2000, too,
for the same or different reasons. What about a chip that is no longer
in production? What about a device/board that is no longer in
production? These issues should be dealt with publicly by NERC.
They aren't.
Now things get a lttle difficult to follow:
It is estimated that less than 1-2% of these devices may use a
time/date function in a manner that could result in a Y2K malfunction
of the device" (p. 9).
First, who estimates 1-2%? Second, is this an industry-wide
estimation? The figure 3% is becoming more common for chips in
general, which the passage indicates they are.
Second, "a malfunction of the device" can refer to the chip or the
board containing 20 to 50 chips. NERC uses "device" both ways.
This is not good. If there are two boards, each containing 50 chips,
and the failure rate for chips is 1%, one of those boards is likely to
fail. If the failure rate is 3%, the odds of failure of one of them
increases.
What this means is that the failure rate for embedded systems
(boards/circuits/devices) is high, even though the likely failure rate
for
one chip is low. This distinction is confirmed in other industries. The
failure rate in complex systems is 50% to 80%; in manufacturing,
15%; in simple systems, 5%. In ships, it is 20%.
Conclusions. NERC has no authority. It is simply the useful whipping
boy for the Department of Energy. If the power system goes down,
nobody at NERC will be whipped. There will be no U.S.
government. If power delivery merely gets erratic, but stays up
nationally, who can hold NERC responsible? It was just doing its job
-- a job without subpoena power. It just reported what companies
told NERC. If some company lies to NERC or misleads NERC, so
what? NERC has no civil power. It's just an industry-funded
research group. The company's executives are not under oath.
In short, the DOE/NERC deal makes lying cheap. In an industry in
which truth-telling would create a national panic, lying is politically
necessary -- a basic function of State. Lowering the cost of lying is
what the DOE/NERC deal is all about. That's my theory, anyway.
What's yours?
Here we sit, waiting for a disaster. Our neighbors know nothing of
NERC. They know nothing of the threat. The press reported a few
lines and went on to other matters. Is anything in today's news more
important than the status of electrical power generation? The silence
of the lambs is matched only by the silence of their shepherds. This
situation is nothing short of bizarre. If you survive, it will be something
to tell to your grandchildren, if they survive.
Link:
ftp://ftp.nerc.com/pub/sys/all_updl/docs/y2k/y2kreport-doe.pdf
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